Robbie Swinnerton serves up morsels from the foodiest city on the planet

Kome: The Art of Rice

03/14/2014

One of the aspects of "Kome: The Art of Rice" that makes it so rewarding – as a non-native speaker/reader of Japanese – is the extensive use of English in the signage for the exhibition.

This is such a profound subject, which goes to the core of Japanese agri/culture. Thankfully non-Japanese are not excluded.

To give you an idea, here are a few of the signs I snapped while I was going round the show before writing it up (for The Japan Times here…). The quality of the photos is poor; but they do illustrate the depth and scope of the show. As I said before: it's highly recommended.

"…there is not much fine art on display, apart from a reproduction of a wonderful ukiyo-e wood-block print triptych drawn in the 1840s by Utagawa Hiroshige."

"…Titled 'The Battle of Confectionery and Sake,' it depicts the forces of mochi (sticky rice cake) and rice-based confectionery taking on an army of sake and related rice brewing, in the style of the Genji-Heike samurai wars."

"…the 3,000 grains contained in a typical bowl of cooked rice are the yield of three bundles of stalks that have emerged from just three grains of paddy rice."

"Rice is also grown to be drunk, as we are reminded by the extensive display of sake label art — in itself a graphic illustration of how Japan’s traditional tipple is evolving a contemporary sensibility."

Lots of my favourite sake labels are on show. Here are just four of them (clockwise from top right): Shichihonyari; Tedorigawa; Izumibashi; and Kiyoizumi.

I visited and wrote about this show from the viewpoint of someone who lives here and for whom rice has been part of my (almost) daily diet for the past 40 years. You could say I have a bias.

For a more scholarly assessment of this exhibition in more "arty" terms – and for a totally different visual take on the galleries – take a look at this review in Domus.